A Snake Census on Fire Island

By LAURIE NADEL

Published: June 9, 2002

''FIRE ISLAND is a good habitat for snakes,'' said Dave Brotherton, who was using a headless golf club to poke under a 2-by-4-foot sheet of corrugated metal lying amid the scrub of the Sunken Forest. ''They like sand.''

After a few unproductive minutes, Mr. Brotherton gave up and moved on to the next coverboard, this one of plywood. Again, there was nothing underneath. Mr. Brotherton was unperturbed.

''We show up and don't know what to expect,'' he said. ''The project was put together to find out what's there.''

A crew chief in charge of eight biologists employed by the Wildlife Conservation Society and National Parks Service, Mr. Brotherton, 30, has gone on snake patrol every day since March. The Fire Island project, which will end in September, is part of a field study of amphibians and reptiles on Long Island and the lower New York Harbor.

In addition to Fire Island, biologists are collecting data at the William Floyd Estate in Shirley and at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay. Simultaneous studies are taking place at Sandy Hook National Seashore, Gateway National Recreation Area and Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

The research marks the final phase of a three-year project called the National Parks Services-World Conservation Society Cooperative Herpetological Inventory and Monitoring Survey of 20 sites at national parks and national historic sites in the Northeast.

Mr. Brotherton and Charlie Eichelberger, 23, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., had scattered 96 coverboards through the dunes of eastern Fire Island the previous week and were revisiting them to see what had crawled underneath. While the simplicity of the project made it look like a science fair, the underlying strategy was to establish the first standardized scientific field research procedures for reptiles and amphibians on Long Island.

''It's exciting to document things that have never been found before,'' Mr. Eichelberger said.

By lunchtime, after he had overturned 40 coverboards, his focus shifted from looking for snakes to looking for an explanation for why they weren't there. Perhaps it was still too cold. ''In 90-degree heat we find snakes under the coverboards,'' he said. ''Rodents hide there and snakes eat rodents.''

Mr. Brotherton sent him to retrieve a tape recorder that had been set up to record frog calls for 30 seconds every 60 minutes. With Mr. Eichelberger gone, Mr. Brotherton was heading east on a fenced boardwalk when he spotted two black racer snakes, the color of new tires, basking in the sun. Each one looked as thick as a man's wrist. They were nonpoisonous, as are all snakes native to the Island.

''They look like they were getting ready to mate,'' he said just before he climbed over the slatted fence to grab a snake's tail. It tried to get away but he wrestled it as if he were Crocodile Dundee, grabbing it behind its head as it thrashed around his forearm, flicking its two-inch-long black forked tongue.

Mr. Brotherton was putting the snake in a white flannel bag that resembled a king-sized pillowcase when the second snake reappeared next to the boardwalk. Tying the neck of the animal bag and leaving it wriggling on the boardwalk, Mr. Brotherton jumped the fence again and lunged across a fallen log into a pool of stagnant water.

He crashed through some thorn bushes to grab the second snake. As he held it about two-thirds of the way from its head, the snake twisted to bite Mr. Brotherton's left wrist with enough force that he fell back into the thorn bushes. But he didn't lose his grip on the snake.

Standing on the boardwalk with his quarry, he studied the blood on his left wrist. ''He has tiny teeth,'' he said.

The snake flicked its tongue at Mr. Brotherton.

Ten minutes later, Mr. Eichelberger returned with the tape recorder, pleased because it had recorded a full frog chorus. He was even happier when he learned about the captured snakes.

Assisted by Mr. Brotherton, he measured and weighed them. The first snake measured 56 inches and weighed about one pound.

''This is a large adult,'' Mr. Eichelberger said as he measured the second snake at 58 1/2 inches. It weighed one pound, 12 ounces, and lay quietly as he painted a three-inch stripe of red nail polish on its tail for future identification.

A few seconds later, when he picked up the snake to put it back in the bag, it reacted by releasing fluid from its cloaca.

Pungent though it was, that close encounter turned out to be the high point of the day, although later that afternoon the discovery of two spotted turtles in a freshwater pond was equally important from a research perspective. Spotted turtles are declining sharply in New York State, where they are officially designated as a species of special concern, a couple of categories short of endangered.

After checking their traps and coverboards every day for two weeks, the scientists moved their investigations to Sagamore Hill, where researchers have logged painted, box, spotted and snapping turtles, wood frogs, spring peepers and spotted salamanders.

''I seem to find a lot of dead stuff and I fall in a lot,'' Linh Phu said as she prepared to wade into a boggy pond. But Ms. Phu, 24, of Washington, didn't fall, and when she pulled up a wire mesh minnow trap, she had a surprise. ''Whoa, I've got a bunch of wood tadpoles,'' she said.

Patiently and conscientiously, Ms. Phu logged the exact location, date, time and number of tadpoles onto a data sheet, which she put into a waterproof aluminum box.

''You can see their little hearts beating,'' she said, counting the wriggling tadpoles before releasing them back into their inky habitat. Each one that lived was expected to reach full length of two to three inches by July.

Photo: Dave Brotherton, left, and Charlie Eichelberger, doing a snake study. (Phil Marino for The New York Times)